Efficient Top-k Join Processing over Encrypted Data in a Cloud Environment

The benefit of the scalability and flexibility inherent in cloud computing motivates clients to upload data and computation to public cloud servers. Because data is placed on public clouds, which are very likely to reside outside of the trusted domain of clients, this strategy introduces concerns regarding the security of sensitive client data. Thus, to provide sufficient security for the data stored in the cloud, it is essential to encrypt sensitive data before the data are uploaded onto cloud servers. Although data encryption is considered the most effective solution for protecting sensitive data from unauthorized users, it imposes a significant amount of overhead during the query processing phase, due to the limitations of directly executing operations against encrypted data. Recently, substantial research work that addresses the execution of SQL queries against encrypted data has been conducted. However, there has been little research on top-k join query processing over encrypted data within the cloud computing environments. In this paper, we develop an efficient algorithm that processes a top-k join query against encrypted cloud data. The proposed top-k join processing algorithm is, at an early phase, able to prune unpromising data sets which are guaranteed not to produce top-k highest scores. The experiment results show that the proposed approach provides significant performance gains over the naive solution.